High Concept: When Dante wakes up in Hell, he must convince the devil to send him back to earth by defeating the devil's seven champions in a battle of words.

Built In: ZeroEngine

 

Development Cycle: February 2012 - March 2012 (4 weeks)

Core Mechanics: 

• Combat based on dialogue trees

• 3 different attack types

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Go to Hell! is a strategy game, inspired artistically and atmospherically by the work of Brian Lee O'Malley. The player uses his preexisting knowledge of the Seven Deadly Sins to decide whether aggression, defense, or indifference is the best strategy against each individual sin.

Postmortem: Although the art works well for a prototype, I would have liked to come back to this game and redo the art for it, specifically to turn it into pixel art and make it feel more like a retro, 8-bit game. The same goes for the soundtrack, which is appropriate but would communicate more of the feel that I wanted if it had that 'retro' feel. The fights themselves could have been made more interesting - the fight with Greed turned out to be rather tedious, due to the fact that you had to take care to heal yourself constantly, which broke the flow of the game a bit. This game has a very strong foundation, and with further polish it could turn into something even more epic. Unfortunately I didn't have time to give the game the amount of polish that I wanted. 

One very satisfying aspect of working on this project was the dialogue: the game is composed entirely of dialogue trees (albeit basic ones), and it was very fun to think of all the different phrases for Dante to say, and the opponents' responses. There were enough dialogue options that it still felt fresh, even if a specific phrase was recycled, but it would have been great to write even more dialogue, and get even further into character with Dante.